The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @bsglaser for the Best Album of 1991 tournament. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you follow the link to vote in the tournament. Thanks!
Hey, what’s jazz doing in this Best Albums tournament? Other than probably losing… Ask the Ages by Sonny Sharrock is here to get right into your soul and make you ask where this record has been all of your life.
That said, jazz isn’t to everyone’s taste—and jazz with roots in the avant-garde edges of the genre maybe even less so. With that in mind, some thoughts for any of us who fall on either side of the Jazz Divide:
ASK THE AGES FOR NOT JAZZ FANS: This is a guitar record, and a motherfucker of a guitar record at that. Sonny Sharrock’s roots start at the outer ends of Coltrane and move on from there, but he was also a fixture of the Downtown NYC/Knitting Factory scene where genres mixed, overlapped and generally took a backseat to pure expression and radical noise. (To hear Sonny go to the furthest outpost of this, check out any of the Last Exit LPs.) So just focus on the guitar playing here, and ASK THE AGES is filled with long melodic lines and feedback freak-outs that would fit right into a Yo La Tengo show or Built to Spill record, and a drawling J Mascis vocal could fit right in with “Once Upon a Time.” There’s a parallel, undiscovered world where just the guitar tracks had been transplanted onto motorik beats and it became a perennial Other Music bestseller. Forget that this is jazz and just come for the guitar attack that could go head-to-head with Neil Young at full Crazy Horse gallop and come out of the wreckage in a million billion perfect pieces.
ASK THE AGES FOR JAZZ HEADS: This is a deeply serious jazz record, and a motherfucker of a jazz record at that. The band alone is all the pedigree it needs, even if you’ve never heard Sonny Sharrock’s name: Coltrane partners Pharaoh Sanders on sax and Elvin Jones on drums, plus bassist Charnett Moffett, who both has a heavy jazz background and a dad (Charles Moffett) who played with the other Sonny (Rollins, that is), Ornette, and others. It would be hard to make a less-than-good jazz record with this band, and they take Sonny’s tuneful, propulsive compositions just outside the lines without losing the plot at any moment. Sonny once said that his main inspirations are sax players like Trane, and that he essentially plays saxophone lines on his guitar—listen closely, and you can hear the breath under all of his playing. And even though this is Sonny’s record, the first solo on opener “Promises Kept” goes to Pharaoh, who sets the ecstatic tone and the mood perfectly, with Elvin and Charnett swinging relentlessly underneath. The six tracks all come in at around 5 to just under 10 minutes long, but within those bounds are ensemble playing and improvised solos of the highest, deepest order.
Ask the Ages strikes the tricky jazz balance between straight-ahead and far-out, and Sonny’s guitar will feel just right to ears primed for overdriven rock rumble. It’s just 44 minutes of beauty and beastliness, and all you have to do is ask it in.
